[Author’s Note: this Blog Post was eventually heavily changed and repurposed to function as a chapter in the TMR Novel. This is the Original & Unedited form. To read the Revised & Refined version, find its corresponding chapter here.]
1,237 journal entries since 7/1/19. There are scattered entries before, but 7/1/19 is the day I count as the start of my journal. It’s been 2,007 days since. 1,237 entries is 61.63% which means that I’ve journaled a bit more than half of the days since I set out to make this a habit.
***A disclaimer***
The data is offset by some days having more than one entry, but that’s just getting pedantic.
Of course, 1,237 only accounts for the entries Notes app. The second time I did The Artist’s Way, I filled up about 6 spiral notebooks with my Morning Pages. I have dozens of other entries in my Google Drive. And let’s not forget the live novelization of my life I began when I was 11 and continued until I was 15 (It was in this iteration of the journal that I came up with the name “Max Bennett Kelly).
I suppose after a decade and a half of writing about myself, it was about time I started a blog. When I first started journaling, I had this secret pipe dream that one day I would be world famous and someone would publish my journals, and people would read it for fun. That was when my entries looked like this:
– Make $100 tips
– Be showered by 8:30
– Finished laundry
– Read 20 of 4 Hour Work Week
– Drank protein shake
– Less than 1 hour negative self talk
– Be on time
It’s funny to look back on because not only were they impersonal, they were BORING. Of course I wasn’t afraid of that being posted. But also.. WHY did I think anyone would want to read that?
I suppose the question still stands – who would want to read this blog? I try not to ask myself questions like that anymore. Nowadays, when that kind of question pops up, I just let it go. If you go back in time in my journal, you’d find a lot of that, especially 2+ years ago. “Who would want to listen to my music?” “Who do I think I am to put my art into the world?” Alternatively, if those questions weren’t there, you could find them in the subtext. Let’s look at previous December 27th-ish entries to see what I was saying.
I’m on the plane and going home.
I’m home in Seattle, but I’m going home to LA. I’ve accepted this. My life is bounded by flights and sudden changes from cold to hot weather.
I feel good. I feel sad, but good. I’m sad that I’ve been sad for so long. That everything I do becomes sad in retrospect. But I’m done.
My dad said that his coach once told him, “one day you have to just decide to stop doubting yourself.” I’m gonna do that. I’m just gonna stop being sad.
It sounds terrible. The exact opposite of any mental hygiene check I’ve been told the last few years. But no, I think I’m just done being sad.
Every time I think about something that happened in college, and it’s tinged blue, I’ll remember the heat of the Arizona sun on me and the freedom that came from knowing even if I did absolutely nothing each day, I was making forward progress.
I will mentally retrace my steps and flip every individual memory into a good one. Every time a memory enters my awareness, I’m flipping it from blue to yellow. It’s easy. I’ve tried this.
I’m so excited to see all of my Arizona friends on New Year’s. I’m tired of thinking resentfully of them. I feel horrible for it.
***
The plane took off and I see the world from up here. I love flying. I love the perspective. I love when the place I just was turns into the image I saw on a map.
And the scope of it all.
I’m me. It all comes back. I didn’t even realize I had forgotten it. I’m Marcello. My parents made me. I grew up. And I’m on a plane and I get emotional looking at the ocean. I’m me. I’m in this body. I’m in this mind. And I know who I am.
Sometimes I forget.
Or perhaps I never really knew? Maybe I’m not remembering anything. Maybe I’m discovering it for the first time.
The weight of life sometimes seems too much for me. I’d rather glide through it. Sometimes the darkness of it all fells my flighty soul.
I was born. I grew up. And now I’m here.
Three short sentences with an entire life in between each period. A life of love, and heartbreak, and art, and light, and darkness, and laughs and hugs and tears and essays and deadlines.
I’m done being anxious right now. I’m done doubting myself. And I’m done being cosmically constipated. I know why I create. To make a lasting reminder of something that moved me. Not art for art’s sake. Art to remind me that I existed, that that moment happened, that I was there. And the medium is the message. The fact that the songs exist is PROOF that I was here. I don’t need to even make songs about that concept. I want to make songs about Puerto Penasco. About my trip to Portugal. About driving around Tucson. About parties at the Hartnett’s. About the girls I’ve loved. About my mom. About my friends.
I’m ready to exist, permanently. Through my art. I’m here. I was here. I always will be. I am.
A bit of a long entry, actually. You can see that I got much better even between 7/1/19 and 12/28/24. I underlined some sentences that made it into the spoken word section of “Superinlove.” Can’t hear it? Listen to the bridge after the second chorus, going into the outro. There’s a bunch of yelling in the background. I’m saying “And when the plane took off, I saw everything. I saw the scope of it all. I’m me. It all comes back. I’m ME. Sometimes I forget. But I know who I am.”
I’ll include the isolated vocals:
[AUTHOR’S NOTE: 8/2/26 10:49AM THIS FILE HAS BEEN REMOVED AS IT HAS BROKEN THE HTML AND I’M TOO LAZY TO FIX IT]
Sometimes there’s a bit of kismet when I go back and look for the day’s journal entry on previous years. Usually there’s a parallel between what I write on any given day across the last five years of consistent entries. Today’s wasn’t super pertinent (mind you, I didn’t even have a 12/27 entry any other year). But I did have a 12/26 entry and THREE 12/28 entries, one of which I showed you, the other of which I included above. Now, I write my daily entry, and after finishing (or whenever I feel inclined) I find it useful to analyze my previous years’ entries and see if there’s a pattern I’m either continuing or breaking.
I’m not joking when I say that almost every time, I find a very suspiciously similar tidbit that crossed my mind, every year. Here’s an extremely private example I’ll give you in exchange for making it this far. On 12/21/24, I wrote an extremely elaborate journal entry, and mentioned How I Met Your Mother, because I’m rewatching it right now. It made me think of my first girlfriend, because we watched it together. I offhandedly mentioned her in my journal. When I was done writing, I searched 12/21 and found it to be one of the rare dates that I have an entry for every year since 2019. And what do you know? On 12/21 there’s a single offhanded remark about this girl for the last 5 years. Isn’t that bizarre? I tried to rack my brain about why, and I remembered. ON 12/21/12, that date 12 years ago, I lost my virginity to that girl (TMI, sorry, and not it’s not weird that I remember the exact date because it was the day the Mayan Calendar said the world would end, so we were like… fuck it, let’s do it). And it just so happens that on that day, 12/21/12, we must have been on our first HIMYM watch. And here I was, 12 years later, thinking about that same girl, watching the same show, on that same date. I like to think that I was on the same episode, too.
The only explanation is that our body or soul has some connection to a point in time, and that there’s some inherent MEANING to each date in the Gregorian calendar. But what IS a date? I suppose it’s a way to describe the position of the Earth in relation to the Sun. It repeats every year when the Earth and Sun are in the same position. And for some reason, the position of the planets for the last five years has made me think of the girl I loved when I was 15. Is there some astrological significance here? Does journaling make me believe in astrology? Sort of. Sort of not. But it makes me think that we are creatures caught in a loop that we have no hope of escaping without acknowledging our predicament first.
Journaling at first was useful as a way to keep track of what I was doing during the day. I was inspired to journal in earnest after reading Michael Crichton’s Travels. He says (paraphrased) that keeping a detailed log of what you do every day is the only way to certify that you are not going insane. Funny enough, back in the day, I used to fear I was going crazy. In fact, in my 12/27/21 entry, I’m freaking out about losing my mind (a common theme back then).
here i am freaking myself out again. i thought i was over this, this fear of going crazy.
it’s obvious why i’m afraid of it. because of jevandre. because of jimmy.
but no one has ever said anything to me. tim literally said i don’t show any signs of it.
i just decided there was something wrong with me and have been rolling with that idea forever. but what if there’s not?
i love all the things running around inside my head. ideas, songs, characters. why am i afraid of them?
it’s kind of a funny idea. fear of imagination. what a way to become a boring adult. like the pixies in fairly odd parents.
its crazy how easy it is to slip into these bad thought patterns when my habits are messed up. going home throws it all through the ringer.
i want to go back to la and get going on my music stuff. i want to have the same motivation i had months ago, before happy healthy. i want to have fun and be happy. i want to sleep soundly. i want a rockin bod.
what’s getting in my way? (cont.)
There was a lot more to this one but I’ll cut it here. I’m extremely proud of myself for not being as afraid of my brain these days.
Also I lied for dramatic effect. There was a 12/27/21 entry but it’s just my tarot reading.
past inverted ten of cups
present inverted the world
future inverted four of swords.
I suppose what I can garner from this time of the year every year, I am extra interested or connected to spiritualism and mysticism and am in a state where my brain is pliable and open. I used to be afraid of it, in ’21, but now, I accept that my brain has to be a putty sort of mush to be open to the energy of the world.
And what better way to start the blog? I suppose since I’ve reached the meta-textual analysis level of navel gazing that my headassery has to go SOMEWHERE. Thanks for reading. Talk soon -mbk
[Hi, author again: In retrospect, an incredibly ambitious first Blog Post. I see the seeds of the following two years of my life written here. That sucks and was not a fun time. Anyways. Thanks for being here. I don’t know who would even be back reading this. But if you are, just know how much I appreciate you.]
